02 July 2012 12:13 PM

Europe: David Cameron has smashed the lid off the Tories' Pandora's Box

by James Chapman

When a Tory leader speaks about Europe, precision is all.

Such is the toxicity of the issue in Conservative ranks - it leads some apparently rational people to do some deeply irrational things - that saying something unclear is worse than saying nothing at all.

William Hague's '12 days to save the pound' was pretty straightforward, for all the good it did him against Tony Blair. John Major's 'wait and see', however, was not, and it led him into all sorts of trouble.

Knowing all this, why did David Cameron intervene on the issue of an EU referendum as he did yesterday? His position is best characterised as 'definitely, maybe'. He thinks Britain will probably need a referendum, but quite when, he's not sure, and what it will ask, he doesn't know.

On the timing of a referendum, the Prime Minister's position is quite sensible. A referendum now, in the middle of the Eurozone debt crisis, and before we know whether the euro will even survive in its present form, would be bizarre. Mr Cameron's opposition to a binary 'in/out' choice is also understandable. Many of the Tory party's staunchest Eurosceptics believe the British people, confronted with a business-led 'yes' campaign warning hundreds of thousands of jobs would be lost in a 'Brixit', would vote to stay in. Former defence secretary Liam Fox warns of just that possibility in his excellent speech this morning at St Stephen's Club in Westminster.

Given all the uncertainties, why has Mr Cameron chosen to speak out now, when he cannot by definition be clear? In part, it looks to be a corrective response to the clumsy remarks he made at a press conference after last week's Brussels summit. Some interpreted the opposition he stated to an 'in/out' referendum as closing the door to any sort of vote. In fact, as I wrote here on Saturday, a referendum has been a live topic of discussion in Tory circles for many months. The question is how best to use it to reinforce demands for, or to approve, a new, looser relationship based largely on trade of the sort people thought they were voting for in 1975.

Downing Street was therefore alarmed that an impression had been given in Brussels that Mr Cameron was closing the door to a referendum, when the opposite was true. It would also have been aware that Dr Fox was planning his first intervention on Europe since leaving the Cabinet.

So the Prime Minister decided to ask for 'tactical and strategic patience' from his party while he works out what to do, while showing a bit of Eurosceptic leg. He is drawing up a list of areas where he wants powers repatriated from Europe, including social affairs, employment regulation and home affairs, to be published in the autumn.

He argues that as the Eurozone inches towards fiscal union, Britain can demand at each stage a return of sovereignty in exchange for allowing the core to integrate further. To be fair to the Prime Minister, he has already done so on one occasion, succeeding in extracting Britain from the Eurozone bailout fund that Alistair Darling signed up to, and wielding his veto when he could not get the safeguards for the City he wanted last December.

But as a piece of party management and political communication, Mr Cameron’s intervention looks spectacularly ill-advised. His party's Eurosceptics are not given to the 'strategic patience' he asks for. The low point in the Prime Minister's newspaper article yesterday, when he weakly suggested that 'for me, the words "Europe" and "referendum" can go together' should have had a red line struck through it.

His lack of precision means all sorts of different scenarios – a referendum to coincide with a 2015 general election, a manifesto pledge to hold one afterwards, legislation in this parliament for a referendum in the next, a three-option ‘in/out/shake it all about’ referendum – are now up and running at Westminster. Voters, who have heard lots of promises from different political leaders about EU referendums before, will be confused and sceptical about Mr Cameron’s intentions.

If Europe is a Pandora's Box for the Conservative Party, Mr Cameron has just smashed the lid off.

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